How to Make Your Website More Likely to Be Recommended by AI

Making your website more likely to be recommended by AI assistants comes down to three things: answer questions directly, keep your business information consistent everywhere, and make sure pages load fast. AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity recommend businesses they can read clearly. Here is what that looks like in practice.

What do AI assistants actually look for on a website?

They are not looking for beautiful design. They are looking for clarity.

An AI assistant trying to recommend a business in your category needs to answer a question with confidence. “Who fixes HVAC systems in the east side of Portland?” To answer that, it needs to find, on your website, that you fix HVAC systems, that you serve that part of Portland, and that you are real and reputable.

Every barrier between that information and the crawler is a reason to skip you and name someone else.

Step one: answer questions directly, in plain text

Write answers to the questions your customers actually ask. Not “we provide excellent service.” Actual questions, actual answers.

• What services do you offer?
• What neighborhoods or cities do you serve?
• Do you offer free estimates?
• What does a first appointment cost?
• How quickly can you respond?

Put these answers on your website as readable text. An FAQ page is ideal. Clearly headed sections work too. The key is that the text is scannable by a machine in under a second, not buried inside an accordion widget or a PDF download.

The words matter too. Use the words your customers use. If people ask for “fence installers” rather than “fencing contractors,” write “fence installers.” AI assistants match your language to the query. If the language does not match, the connection does not get made.

Step two: get your load time under three seconds

AI crawlers have time limits and crawl budgets. WordPress sites average 5 to 10 second load times on mobile. A crawler stopping by a slow site collects less data than it would from a fast one, which means less content gets indexed and fewer details are available when the assistant is deciding who to recommend.

Sites with clean structure, fast load times, and clear schema markup get cited more often by AI assistants. Speed is not a nice-to-have. It is a structural advantage.

Read more about why slow load times hurt your visibility.

Step three: add structured data for your business

Structured data, also called schema markup, is a standard label you add to your website that tells machines exactly what kind of business you are. It can include your business name, address, phone number, service area, hours, and even your reviews.

Most small business websites do not have this. That means adding it puts you ahead of most of your competitors immediately.

The most useful types for local businesses:

• LocalBusiness or a more specific subtype like Plumber, Dentist, or Restaurant
• Service for each major thing you offer
• FAQPage for your question-and-answer sections
• Review for your customer testimonials

If your site already has clear, fast pages, adding schema is the next step. There is a full explanation of what schema markup is and how to add it here.

Step four: make your business information consistent everywhere

AI assistants do not rely on your website alone. They cross-check. If your name, address, and phone number on your website do not match what appears on your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, and your industry directories, the system’s confidence in recommending you drops.

Pick one format for your business name, address, and phone. Use it everywhere. No variations, no abbreviations. This sounds small. It is not.

Step five: earn and respond to reviews

AI assistants read reviews and weigh them. Volume matters. Recency matters. What reviews actually say matters. A business with 40 reviews over the past year looks alive and trusted. A business with 4 reviews from three years ago looks uncertain.

Ask for reviews consistently. A few per month beats a burst once. Reply to every review you receive, including the bad ones. Those replies are indexed too, and a thoughtful reply to a complaint is its own trust signal.

What this looks like on a well-built site

On a site built for AI visibility, all of this is automatic. The structure is clean. Schema is built in. Pages load in under two seconds. The copy is written in plain, specific language. Business information is consistent across every channel.

Basalt moves small business websites off WordPress to a platform with nothing to hack and nothing to update. The move is free. What gets built is fast, labeled, and readable by the crawlers that determine who gets recommended next. For the full picture of how AI recommendations work, start here.

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